D. J. Waldie

The benign climate of Los Angeles, the excellent highways, the desire to escape into an alternate reality and the skills of Hollywood designers were material causes of our architecture of fakery, informing how donuts, ice cream and pianos were sold.

The optimistic essence of the California's golden dream endures — as it should — but the future of the state depends on Californians dreaming differently.

In the 1850s-70s, an elaborately themed garden surrounded the town's most eccentric building, the Round House.

L.A. once sold its climate as "semi-tropical" – a term that emphasized the uniqueness of its nature. Semi-tropical was semi-miraculous.

L.A. for a generation was extraordinarily violent, even more violent than frontier towns more famous in Western lore.

The Pacific Southwest Exposition embodied the spirit of 1920s Hollywood: spectacle for its own sake, cheerful vulgarity, and commercial hard sell.

In the 1880s, an author-activist and a once-prominent Angeleno unwittingly constructed an enduring Spanish fantasy past myth for Southern California.

At the border of three worldviews – native, colonial, and Anglo – medical care in Los Angeles by the 1850s blended empirical science, European and native folk traditions, and a large dose of medical hucksterism.

Most tourists once came to Southern California in the winter – and then the All-Year Club invented the L.A. summer.

A popular carnival stunt in 1930s Los Angeles featured beautiful Gloria Graves, buried alive in her coffin.